Multigrid for Locally Refined Meshes

Abstract

A multilevel method for the solution of finite element schemes on locally refined meshes is introduced. For isotropic diffusion problems, the condition number of the two-level method is bounded independently of the mesh size and the discontinuities in the diffusion coefficient. The curves of discontinuity need not be aligned with the coarse mesh. Indeed, numerical applications with 10 levels of local refinement yield a rapid convergence of the corresponding 10-level, multigrid V-cycle and other multigrid cycles which are more suitable for parallelism even when the discontinuities are invisible on most of the coarse meshes.